Almost 30 years after he was killed, finally somebody has been found guilty in court of the murder of Tupac Shakur.
A Las Vegas jury has found that South Side Compton Crips leader Duane Keith Davis is the person responsible for gunning down the rapper, thus bringing to an end one of the longest-running music-related mysteries, one that has spawned several documentaries and countless conspiracy theories.
Shakur was one of the world’s highest-profile rappers when he was shot four times in a car near the Las Vegas strip in September 1996. Death sells, and Shakur’s legend only grew as a result of his murder – he would continue to have posthumous hits for many years after.
The jury took only three hours to reach its guilty verdict in a case that relied on Davis’ own confessions, including a description of the killing that he included in his 2019 memoir Compton Street Legend.
Davis’s attorney Michael Sanft tried to persuade the jury that those stories were deliberately exaggerated and embellished, and painted a picture of a man who had hoped to benefit from public interest in the notorious case. Ultimately, they didn’t buy it.
Davis had written about what happened on the evening of 7 September 1996. He said that he had hatched the plan to retaliate against Shakur after the rapper’s entourage beat his nephew, Orlando ‘Baby Lane’ Anderson, in the lobby of the MGM Grand Hotel earlier that night. Anderson, who died two years later in an unrelated shootout, was a member of a rival gang in South Central LA.
Why did it take so long to bring Davis to trial? A Los Angeles Times investigation in 2015 revealed that the police failed to investigate Anderson even after the brawl between him and Shakur’s entourage became known. For their part, investigators maintained that it was challenging to prove because they struggled to produce physical evidence and faced strong resistance from potential witnesses, including some members of Shakur’s entourage. Even now, some resisted participating in the case and had to be compelled to come to court.
Ultimately, though, Davis brought the case to them on a plate and ended up being the lead witness as well as defendant. “Had he decided to never write the book,” the Clark County district attorney Marc DiGiacomo pointed out during the trail, “he would not, probably, have ever been prosecuted for the crime.”
